In the foreground thin women push prams and figures loiter in the doorways of
grey terraces, but mostly the streets are empty.

The milling crowd behind stands in a dark rectangle watching a football game, and to the sides and the endless distance, are red mills, houses and factories, chimneys coughing curved black smoke into the white sky. The Football Match, one of LS Lowry’s most lovely paintings, is up for sale a week tomorrow in London.

Lowry liked football (as well as being a cricket fan who talked with some happiness of watching Wilfred Rhodes), and is thought to have supported Manchester City although he also went to Bolton Wanderers as Burnden Park was within walking distance of his house in Pendlebury.

His football pictures, though small in number, are thought of as significant, and The Football Match, painted in 1949, is important because it combines the excitement, importance and feel of the Saturday football game with the industrial landscape he was so famous for.

Now, mostly, the factories and mills of Manchester and Salford have gone, and it is the stadiums that dominate the skyline, huge and sometimes brutal.

At the mammoth Old Trafford the traditional two-storey chip shops, bookmakers and pubs remain, but around the corner is the stark Imperial War Museum North and just across the Quays, the Lowry arts centre itself and Media City where the BBC and Coronation Street are to relocate.

Over at East Manchester, once the workshop of the world, the City of Manchester Stadium is built on top of the huge Bradford Colliery.

The heavy industry that once made up the landscape is gone, instead there is regeneration everywhere — the national squash centre, the velodrome, the indoor tennis centre, and one of the largest Asda stores in the country.

The renewal of this area has changed the direction of Manchester, much as City fans hope the FA Cup win will transform the fortunes of their team.

But though the modern buildings might baffle Lowry, who died in 1976 before the death rattle of heavy industry, the mass movement of people at set times that so interested him about both football and factories remains the same. Even in “The Football Match” the focus of the painting is the crowd — you can barely see the players.

At Old Trafford at least, in spite of the influx of fans from beyond the M60, the same families mass together in the same streets just before kick- off and walk the same route and sup the same drink as their grandfathers did before the war.

And football’s influence, Manchester football’s influence, has only grown since 1949 — just ask the thousands who will turn out for Manchester’s two victory parades this month: City’s flourishing of the FA Cup on May 23 and United’s celebration, postponed to May 30 in the hope that they will have collected a timely win against Barcelona and will be able to show both the League title and the Champions Trophy.

What Lowry, a door-to-door rent collector who revelled in his dour image and never had a car and never went abroad, would have made of the modern footballer is interesting.

Certainly he hated the element of celebrity that his painting brought him, and was said to always keep a suitcase by the door so that he could claim he was just leaving should anyone pop by.

The most expensive Lowry football painting sold to date was Going to the Match, which was bought by the Professional Footballers’ Association as an investment in 1999 and is now on loan to the Lowry in Salford.

Christie’s were tight-lipped over any potential buyers next week and the PFA did not answer an inquiry as to whether it would be tempted to add to its collection.

Rachel Hidderley, of Christie’s, thinks The Football Match, which has been hidden from public view for 20 years, is the finest Lowry they have ever put up for sale, and it is expected to break the record for a Lowry (which is £3.8 million For Good Friday, Daisy Nook in 2007) with an estimate of £3.5-£4.5 million.

Perhaps a philanthropic northern footballer might like to dig in his pockets and buy the picture for the Lowry or the National Football Museum, which reopens at Urbis in Manchester early next year. More expensive than a superinjunction perhaps, but so very much more satisfying.